Thursday, June 30, 2016

During the 2015 election, Justin Trudeau made a number of promises to immigrant communities across the country. He has kept some of those promises. Avvy Go writes:

To his credit, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau
has either delivered on a number of his promises, or has taken some
critical first steps towards their implementation, not the least of
which are the inquiry into the missing and murdered Indigenous women and
girls, the reinstatement of the Court Challenges Program, and the
acceptance of more than 20,000 Syrian refugees.

In
some immigrant communities, the change in government has even generated
rumours that there are now more generous rules granting permanent
resident status for non-status immigrants. Several ethno-racial legal
clinics are seeing a sudden surge of clients who have lived underground
for many years in Canada, and are now reaching out for help to
regularize their status.

But Trudeau promised much more. And there is much more to do:

On other issues, repeated assurances have been
made for reform with no concrete action. An example of this is the
Liberal promise to revoke the Conditional Permanent Resident (CPR)
status, which forces sponsored spouses to stay in a relationship with
their sponsors for two years or risk losing their permanent resident
status. This CPR provision has been shown to increase the risk of
domestic violence and abuse. Immigration Minister John McCallum has said
that the CPR will be revoked, without stating when or clarifying
whether the revocation will be made retroactive to cover all those who
have been, and continue to be, subject to investigation by immigration
authorities.

Further, while there has been
talk to reform the Temporary Foreign Workers Program, the consultations
to date have been skewed towards employers and agencies that broker
contracts, as opposed to the migrants living in precarious conditions.

True, the “to do” list for the new government is long. But it is not long enough.

Missing from the list is the much needed renewal of Canada’s Action Plan
Against Racism (CAPAR) instituted by the Paul Martin government in
2005. Little to no action has been taken over the last 10 years to
maintain programs that were once designed to combat systemic racism, let
alone implement new measures to address growing colour-coded
disparities. Although it is encouraging to see significant commitments
and initiatives with respect to Indigenous issues and concerns, for
peoples of colour Canada has effectively wasted 10 years on this
important file.

Yesterday Trudeau, and Presidents Obama and Pena Nieto made a joint commitment to co-operation and openness. Like charity, they also begin at home.

Tuesday, June 28, 2016

Everywhere in the English speaking world, Lawrence Martin writes, conservatism is in trouble:

In Britain, party hardliners pushed David
Cameron into calling a referendum on the European Union. With the Brexit
result, they are now in control. The consequences for Britain and well
beyond Britain, as the great wealth of analysts agree, could be dire.

In the United States, the Republican Party
fell under the sway of Dick Cheney and his ilk. They brought on the
Iraq war, the consequences of which have been dire and still are. The
Republican Party then fell into the grip of the radical-right Tea Party.
Now they are under the control of demagogue Donald Trump. His appeal
has similarities to that of the rebels in the British Conservative
Party. It is driven by aging, angry-man populism.

If
you like Brexit, if you liked the Iraq war, if you favour the
retrograde prejudices of Donald Trump, you will like the direction of
modern-day conservatism.

And that's the point. Increasingly, modern day conservatism has shown itself to be retrograde, morally bankrupt and incapable of meeting the demands of the new century. However, Canadian conservatives haven't figured that out yet:

They don’t see Brexit as a step backward. They don’t see the new
conservatism as a sure bet to lose the battle of the generations. In
Britain, surveys showed the youth were most opposed to Brexit, seniors
most in favour. In the correctly named Grand Old Party, the appeal under
Mr. Trump is primarily to aging, less-educated voters. Stephen Harper’s
Conservatives played mostly to the old-age demographic as well.
Millennials being the voice of the future, what are these parties
thinking?

It would appear that conservatives -- Canadian conservatives particularly -- preach selfishness and are incapable of complex thought.

Monday, June 27, 2016

The ripples from Britain's decision to leave the EU keep spreading. The most immediate shocks, of course, are being felt in the UK. Michael Harris writes:

David Cameron and his government, gone; Britain’s senior EU official,
Jonathon Hill, gone. Aflame with divorce anger, European leaders
wanting the UK out of the marital home tout de suite. More than a
million Europeans living in London potentially gone. The opposition
Labour Party in chaos with half the shadow cabinet resigning after
millions of voters rejected Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn’s injunction to
stay in the EU. And the unthinkable prospect of a Donald Trump/Boris
Johnson transatlantic political axis.

On the economic side, Moody’s lowered the UK’s “outlook” from stable to
negative. Overnight, Britain slipped from the fifth-largest economy in
the world to sixth, leap-frogged by France. The pound dropped like a
stone. There are reports that Brexit wiped out $2-trillion in wealth,
though it is far from certain whether those assets were made of anything
more substantial than paper.

And then there is Scotland. Scots recently voted against independence
largely because they were told that if they split with the UK, they
would also be splitting with the EU. Now that Scotland has apparently
lost the highly valued EU connection, there has been an immediate call
for a second vote on independence. In fact, Scottish First Minister
Nicola Sturgeon is threatening to veto the Brexit vote, and directly
lobby EU member states to allow Edinburgh to remain inside the
pan-European trading bloc.

The United Kingdom may soon be a thing of the past. And, likewise, the EU -- at least as it is presently constituted -- may soon be assigned to the dustbin of history:

The whole European shooting match is now in play. What is to stop
hard-right nationalists in places like France and the Netherlands from
demanding a referendum of their own on their futures in the EU? There is
already the same anti-immigrant sentiment in those countries waiting to
be exploited by native populists cut from the same cloth as Boris
Johnson and Michael Gove.

Both countries will be facing elections next year and it’s a safe bet
that leaving the EU will be front and centre on the political agendas,
pushed by National Front vice-president Florian Philippot in France, and
the Freedom Party in the Netherlands. And they are not the only
countries that might be thrown into chaos by the euroskeptics taking
heart from the Brexit vote.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the political opposition in
Sweden has been inspired by Britain bailing out of Europe. Opposition
leader Mattias Karlsson told the WSJ the British vote was inspiring and
that, “We will start campaigning for a Swexit.”

Likewise with Italy’s Northern League and its leader Matteo Salvini.
He said that it’s time Italians had the chance to pass their own
judgement on EU membership. Salvini, who is an unabashed Trump
supporter, is known for his vitriolic attacks on migrants, and his
praise for the “good works” of fascist Italian dictator, Benito
Mussolini. Trump in turn has expressed his hope that the Northern League
leader will be the next prime minister of Italy.

The world is being remade -- and whether or not it will be for the better is entirely uncertain.

Sunday, June 26, 2016

We don't know what the long term consequences of Britain's decision to leave the EU will be. But, Tom Walkom writes, there are already lessons to be learned:

First, democracy and advanced capitalism
aren’t always compatible. Britain’s voters were asked whether they
wanted to stick with a globalized system designed to increase wealth in
the aggregate. The majority looked at what they were getting out of the
arrangement and said no.

Second,
nationalism is alive. There was a time, not so long ago, when the
nation-state was viewed as passé. It is not. When Britain’s leavers said
they didn’t want to be governed by bureaucrats in Brussels, they meant
it.

Third, full labour mobility is,
politically, a step too far. The conceit of the European Union was that
it had erased borders — that EU citizens could travel, work and live
anywhere.

Thursday’s referendum showed that
a lot of Britons simply don’t agree. If the polls are right, a lot of
other Europeans don’t agree either. They fear an unrestricted flood of
newcomers will drive down wages. Sometimes, these fears are justified.

Fourth,
the refusal of centre and left parties to deal with any of this has
allowed the hard right to monopolize antiglobalization sentiment. In
Britain, the right dominated the leave campaign in part because there
was no one else.

In the United States,
would-be presidential nominee Bernie Sanders articulated a centre-left
critique of globalization. But his Democratic party didn’t agree. Now
demagogue Republican Donald Trump has the field to himself.

The United States has its critics of globalization on both the Left and on the Right. In Britain, it was the Right that won the day. And there are lessons, too, about the kind of leadership the Right espouses:

The motives of those who voted to leave the EU in Thursday’s referendum were not always noble.

Racism
played a role as did plain old xenophobia. Those leading the leave
campaign were hardly Churchillian. They included Nigel Farage, the
odious leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party as well as former
London mayor Boris Johnson, a buffoonish toff who may well end up being
the country’s next prime minister.

But the most important lesson was simply this:

Global integration may serve that abstraction known as the economy. But it doesn’t always help real, flesh-and-blood people.

The lessons are there. We'll have to wait and see if people around the world are paying attention.

Saturday, June 25, 2016

The Harperites have never liked the courts or judges. Michael Harris writes:

Remember Stephen Harper’s attack on Supreme Court Chief Justice
Beverley McLachlin — the one that had her squirmin’ in her ermine? And
then there was Dean Del Mastro’s assertion that his guilty verdict on
four counts of electoral fraud was only Judge Lisa Cameron’s “opinion.”

The CPC crew has always been happiest being judge in its own cause.
It treated the judiciary like interfering busybodies good only for
rubber-stamping the government’s agenda, constitutional or otherwise.

Bayne points out that this amounts to challenging and attacking
Justice Vaillancourt’s finding of facts on those very same impugned
expense matters now being regurgitated by the Senate. As Bayne reminds
the Clerk of the Standing Committee on Internal Economy in a
hand-delivered letter dated June 22, “leading evidence which is
inconsistent with findings made in the accused’s favour in a previous
proceeding” is precluded from subsequent proceedings. “Thus Justice
Vaillancourt’s positive factual findings about all of the impugned
expense matters cannot be challenged, attacked or contradicted.”

Justice Vaillancourt had all the evidence available to arrive at his
decision. There was no new evidence, as the Standing Committee on
Internal Economy originally claimed in their June 8, 2016 letter to
Duffy asking for repayment of $16,955 in ineligible expenses.

I have written earlier in this space that perseveration is a symptom of brain damage. One has to wonder if the Conservative caucus in the Senate is brain damaged.

Friday, June 24, 2016

Britain is out. Yesterday was momentous and there is no telling what the consequences will be. But, Andrew Nikiforuk writes, yesterday had everything to do with what he calls, "the misery of bigness:"

Years ago, the great Austrian economist Leopold Kohr argued that
overwhelming evidence from science, culture and biology all pointed to
one unending truth: things improve with an unending process of division.

The breakdown ensured that nothing ever got
too big for its own britches or too unmanageable or unaccountable.
Small things simply worked best.

Kohr pegged part of the problem with bigness as "the law of
diminishing sensitivity." The bigger a government or market or
corporation got, the less sensitive it became to matters of the
neighbourhood.

In the end bigness, just like any empire, concentrated power and delivered misery, corruption and waste.

Kohr was an iconoclast whose

masterful and humorous work, The Breakdown of Nations, argued
the root of most evil lies in big government and big institutions.
Whenever power reached it, a critical mass, its wielders, no matter how
nice or educated, tended to abuse it. Bigness not only allowed but
invited the abuse.

The only way to stop the cancer of bigness was to return to the modesty of smallness.

"If a society grows beyond its optimum
size, its problems must eventually outrun the growth of those human
faculties which are necessary for dealing with them," wrote Kohr.

The problem, he added, "is not to grow but to stop growing; the answer not union but division."

Yesterday the Brits put another nail in the coffin of globalization. Despite what its cheerleaders say, it's falling apart. The centre cannot hold -- for good or ill.

Thursday, June 23, 2016

By the time Stephen Harper left office, no one believed a word of any environmental assessment issued by the federal government. Jason MacLean writes:

In 2012 the Harper government gutted the
Canadian Environmental Assessment Act, the National Energy Board Act,
the Fisheries Act and the Navigable Waters Protection Act. Thousands of
natural resources projects were exempted from assessments of their
potentially significant adverse environmental effects.

Energy
projects — including politically charged pipeline proposals — were
subjected to far narrower reviews with radically restricted public
participation. Fish habitats have been put in serious jeopardy, with 99
per cent of Canada’s rivers and lakes left unprotected.

Summing
up the state of Canadian environmental law following the controversial
2012 omnibus amendments, Devon Page, the executive director of
Ecojustice, frankly observed that “Canada has some of the worst
environmental laws in the world.”

The Trudeau government has declared that it will review all environmental assessment procedures:

Building on its interim measures announced earlier this year, it will
appoint expert panels to review the key environmental laws gutted in
2012. They will report back in January 2017, have a mandate to rebuild
trust in environmental assessment processes, modernize the National
Energy Board and introduce safeguards to the Fisheries Act and
Navigation Protection Act.

The government has before it a Herculean task, given the cynicism that Harper left in his wake. For the review to be successful, Maclean writes, three things must happen:

First, the government’s review truly has to be
an overhaul, not merely a touch up. With just over 1,000 days until the
next election, the government may be tempted to do the bare minimum to
declare victory. At a recent meeting of leading environmental assessment
practitioners and scholars, for example, the Minister of Environment
and Climate Change asked whether there was anything “worth keeping” in
the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act, 2012. The answer, no matter
how politically inconvenient, is no.

Second,
the fundamental assumption underlying environmental assessment must
shift from how a proposed project will proceed to whether it proceeds at
all. And the way to answer that question is not by mitigating adverse
biophysical impacts, but by assessing whether a project will make a net
contribution to sustainable development and decarbonization, thereby
helping us meet our Paris climate change commitments.

Finally,
the government says that public consultation will be the core of its
review. It promises a co-ordinated, open and transparent process based
on scientific evidence, working in partnership with indigenous peoples,
provinces and territories and input from the public, industry and
environmental groups.

Getting agreement on expansion of the CPP took considerable effort. But it will be much more difficult to restore faith in the government's ability to conduct objective environmental assessments.

Wednesday, June 22, 2016

It's interesting that one of the loudest voices from the Right is giving the Trudeau government a thumbs up. Michael den Tandt writes:

There was good, bad and more than a bit of ugly in the first sitting of
Canada’s 42nd parliament. On balance, however, Prime Minister Justin
Trudeau’s Liberals are hitting the 2016 BBQ circuit with a breeze at
their backs — as much because of how they’ve adjusted to mistakes, as
their successes.

There were mistakes and miscues. But the government recognized them -- publicly:

The Liberals have shown themselves nimble enough to adjust on the fly.
The same goes for their handling of Bill C-14, the law regulating
assisted dying, which was a hot potato foisted on them by the Supreme
Court of Canada’s 2015 ruling and the Harper government’s refusal to
address it.

As I argued last time, the passage of C-14 through the Senate Friday
is not only a triumph for the ministers responsible — Health Minister
Jane Philpott and Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould — but a positive
signal about the viability of Trudeau’s new, independent Senate. It has
passed its first major test.

Finally, voters who opted for the
Liberals last year will note the party promised them three core,
bread-and-butter reforms in the campaign: a new Canada Child Benefit, a
tax cut for middle-income earners and national pension reform.

It's too early to call the Trudeau government a success. But it's doing politics differently than the previous government. This week's pension deal underscores that fact.

Tuesday, June 21, 2016

Despite howling from the Conservatives and the Fraser Institute, Ottawa and the provinces have reached a deal to expand the Canada Pension Plan. A short time ago, such an outcome seemed impossible. However, Canadian Press reports:

Following weeks of talks and an all-day meeting in Vancouver on Monday,
finance ministers emerged with the agreement-in-principle.

Even provinces such as Saskatchewan and British Columbia, which had
expressed concerns about the timing of CPP reform, had signed on. Only
Manitoba and Quebec declined to agree to the terms.

The agreement came together as pollsters pointed to overwhelming
popular support for public pension reform amid concerns about the
adequacy of retirement savings.

The federal Liberals ran on platform to upgrade the public pension
system, as did their Ontario cousins. The result also means Ontario will
abandon its project to go it alone with its own pension plan.

Why such an abrupt change in the winds?

Sources familiar with the talks said doubters had concerns about the
potential economic impact of boosting the CPP, even at the late stages
of negotiations.

They said Ottawa made a major push in the final days and hours, which
helped secure enough country-wide support to expand the CPP. To make
the change, they needed consent of a minimum of seven provinces
representing at least two-thirds of Canada’s population.

The sources also suggested Prime Minister Justin Trudeau himself was involved in the extra effort.

On top of that, Ontario, which had been moving forward its
more-ambitious pension plan proposal, backed away from its earlier
demands that CPP reform should be just as robust.

Monday, June 20, 2016

Now that the House has risen, Michael Harris has issued Justin Trudeau his report card. He has given Trudeau quite a few A's (or dimes, which we used to get with good marks):

Trudeau gets another dime for keeping the promise to pass legislation
on medically assisted dying, despite the political, ethical, and
emotional minefield that had to be navigated to pull this off. For all
the dark murmuring about Trudeau’s alienation of the Senate, he got Bill
C-14 through the Red Chamber without compromising the government’s
commitment to retain some limits on access to doctor-assisted suicide.

Who knows? With his arm’s length advisory board recommending
merit-based senate nominees, the PM may be well on the way to
transforming the Red Chamber into an independent body capable of
fulfilling its parliamentary obligations without a constitutional
amendment. That’s a lot better than a Senate that played partisan stooge
to the PMO’s dark machinations during the Harper years, culminating in
the Wright-Duffy fiasco.

Trudeau gets an A+ and a big bag of dimes for each of unmuzzling
scientists (with the notable exception of Patricia Sutherland)
withdrawing Canadian jets from Iraq and Syria; bringing gender equality
to the cabinet table; bringing back the long-form census; and lowering
middle-class taxes while creating a new tax bracket on income over
$200,000 — all in jig time.

This gives hope that the momentous issues ahead might actually be
delivered as promised — the inquiry into missing and murdered native
women; a revamped electoral system that will do away with the partisan
nonsense that the Tories tried to pass off as democratic reform; the
legalization of marijuana; a nation-to-nation relationship with First
Nations; the amending of the secret police provisions of Harper’s
so-called national security legislation, Bill C-51; a new Health Accord
with the provinces, and a national framework for fighting climate
change.

But not all of Trudeau's marks win praise at home:

The guy who paddled the Rouge River in Scarborough and then set
McDonald’s aflutter by dropping in for a bite, gets a D for leaving
Canadian veterans waiting on key elements of his reform plan to undo the
damage of the Harper years. Disabled veterans are still awaiting
pension reform promises and the reopening of those nine Veterans
Assistance Centres closed during the Harper years to help his government
“balance” the budget.

The PM gets an F for allowing Harper’s sleazy “future appointments”
to stand, largely it seems, from fear of lawsuits that might arise if he
cancelled these jammy gigs. For that matter, he gets another F for
letting Harper-appointed public servants hang around key departments he
must ultimately redirect if he is to fulfill his legislative agenda.
Insiders saw stark evidence of that at the climate talks in Paris. Too
much retro-Harper think.

He also gets an F for not sending all of the proposed pipeline
projects back to square one of the environmental assessment process. For
starters, a complete reset was what he promised First Nations,
environmental groups, and several British Columbia mayors during the
election campaign. But more importantly, Harper had made a mockery of
the assessment process and the National Energy Board to the extent that
none of its previous decisions can be trusted. They need to be revisited
if public confidence is to be restored in how the government green
lights major pipeline projects.

And then there's the biggest F of all:

And now for Trudeau’s biggest F — as in FU — the Saudi arms deal. No
matter how many tortured political yoga positions adopted by Foreign
Affairs minister Stephane Dion, this is a stinker. It is not about
Canada keeping its word: it is about Canada abandoning its core values.
This is checkbook pragmatism at its worst. This is feeding people to the
sharks for money.

The Saudi Royal family makes Henry VIII look like a new-age,
sensitive guy. They cut off heads at the drop of a veil. They mete out a
thousand lashes for a few words of free expression. They crush the
slightest movement toward democracy and they do it with equipment
purchased from the Americans — and now from Canada. And if that isn’t
enough reason not to sell them armoured vehicles mounted with heavy
machine guns, how about the Saudi-led genocidal war against Yemen?

Sunday, June 19, 2016

Justin Trudeau is changing the rules about how to do politics. Evan Solomon writes:

“We were perhaps
behaving in a way that was resembling more the previous government,”
Trudeau told stunned reporters as he explained that he would cede to
opposition requests to more fairly distribute seats on his electoral
reform committee—a sudden and surprising climbdown. Did Trudeau just
compare himself to Stephen Harper? Yes, he did. This was after he’d
already reversed course on the assisted-dying bill’s Motion 6, which
would have limited opposition debate. And after he’d apologized—numerous
times—for the infamous elbow incident. Trudeau was just doing what he
has done since the campaign: breaking the five cardinal rules of
political communication.

Those five cardinal rules -- up until now -- have been:

1. The flip-flop rule: Reversing decisions makes you look indecisive. Stick to your promises or people will stop trusting you.2. The loser rule: Never repeat your negatives because you
end up validating them. It goes without saying that you don’t compare
yourself to the man you just defeated.3. The blabber rule: Once you’re explaining, you’re losing. Keep messages simple.4. The message-control rule: Never let the opposition or caucus take over the agenda. Leaders control; leaders look strong.5. The wimp rule: Never give in to the opposition’s criticisms. Their job is to oppose. Your job is to lead.

Trudeau's approach, Solomon writes, is the equivalent of the three point shot in basketball:

Every time Trudeau fades back and launches another of his
high-risk moon shots—legalizing pot, pricing carbon, buying navy ships,
changing the way elections are won—you think he’s going to fail.

There are misses, for sure, lots of them, as Trudeau is the first to
admit. But when he scores, he scores big. The age of political
incrementalism, the policy layup shot, is over. Trudeau is breaking the
rules and hitting all net.

There are a few other mistakes I'd like to see him admit -- starting with the Saudi arms deal. But, if he admits too many mistakes, his fans may not fill the seats.

Saturday, June 18, 2016

Chantal Hebert writes this morning that the battle over Bill C-14 signals a new source of opposition for any Canadian government -- the Senate:

The legislative discussion over bill C-14
is over but the debate over the role of a more independent Senate in
the larger parliamentary scheme of things has only just begun. It is
already eliciting some diametrically opposed views as to the way
forward.

There are two clearly different views about how the Senate should function:

At one extreme, there are those who would
invest a more independent upper house with the mission of perfecting the
work of their elected colleagues. In their book, a decrease in partisan
attachment increases the moral authority of the senate, to the point
that it should use the powers vested in it by the Constitution to the
fullest — even when it means going against the will of the House of
Commons.

But power is intoxicating. Its
fumes are addictive. Almost every governing party eventually succumbs to
the delusion of believing itself infallible and invincible. The cure
usually involves a voter-imposed spell in opposition rehab.

And there's the rub. The Senate is unelected. Recognizing that fact, a majority of senators sent the bill back to the House, with its most controversial clause, "reasonably foreseeable," in tact.

The second theory of how the Senate should operate is also intriguing:

At the other extreme, there are those who feel
that a still unelected but more independent Senate is ultimately even
less accountable than its previous partisan version. No particular party
is responsible for its actions. They argue such a Senate should be
content to play the role of if not silent at least always compliant
partner to the elected majority in the Commons.

Except
that under the current electoral system, a majority government does not
de facto speak for a majority of voters, it just speaks for more of
them than any other of its opposition rivals.

I suspect this version of how the Senate works will go the way of the Dodo -- thanks to the Mike Duffy trial. The days are gone when the PMO can call the tune and have senators do its bidding.

In fact, the Senate will no longer do any government's bidding -- until it has had its say.

Friday, June 17, 2016

Kevin O'Leary wants to lead the Conservative Party of Canada. But, before they hand him the keys to the kingdom, the Conservatives would do well to examine the fate of another star of reality television -- who is spontaneously combusting. Micheal Harris writes:

Frothing-at-the-mouth populism is face-planting south of the border. The
Donald is not only getting the big “F— you Donald Trump” from rocker
Neil Young. He’s not only being told that he’s a fascist
democracy-killer by the likes of Johnny Depp — in effect, according to
the actor, the “last” president of the United States Americans will ever
have if they’re foolish enough to elect him. He isn’t just being called
out as a fake and a fraud by the Republican establishment, including
the party’s last presidential candidate, Mitt Romney.

The polls seem to indicate that Young and Depp are not alone in their opinion of Trump:

Despite the Rosie O’Donnell treatment Trump has meted out to Hillary
Clinton, the first woman running for the White House in American history
leads the Donald by 12 points nationwide. Trump owns a 70 per cent
disapproval rating with women; with Mexican Americans, the Donald’s
disapproval soars to 89 percent — and when it comes to African
Americans, the reality TV star is about as popular as the Zika virus, with a
stunning 94 per cent disapproval rating.

And then came Orlando:

Orlando was a train-wreck for Trump. Obama, he hinted, had not taken
forceful action to stop domestic terrorism because he sides with Muslim
extremists. It was an odd moment — a presidential candidate actually
suggesting that a sitting U.S. president was in some way complicit with
terrorists — was a traitor. As Bloomberg News reported, that “landed
with a thud for the majority of Americans, with 61 per cent disagreeing
with that suggestion.”

Trump also displayed what a horse’s ass he is when it comes to
informed analysis of world events. In referring to the Orlando shooting,
the Donald talked about the danger of allowing “thousands and thousands
of Syrians into the country.” But the shooter Omar Mateen was an
American citizen, born in Queens, New York. And his parents didn’t come
from Syria, but Afghanistan.

You don't have to be smart to make it on Reality TV. You just need to be controversial -- the more the better. And, in the final analysis, everybody loses -- including the star.

Thursday, June 16, 2016

There is a lot of chatter -- particularly from the Conservatives -- about holding a referendum on electoral reform. Gerry Caplan doesn't think a referendum is a good idea. He writes:

To raise issues related to democracy
is to raise the question of referendums (or referenda), which are
favoured by the Conservatives. They insist only a referendum can
legitimize something as fundamental to our democracy as changing our
voting system. Presumably the Conservatives also believe a referendum
would end up supporting the FPTP status quo, as they themselves do.

But
there’s a huge problem here. As any sensible political scientist will
attest, the legitimacy of a referendum depends to a substantial extent
on the clarity of its language. It must not be too complex or raise
issues that most voters will find baffling and thereby diminish the
credibility of the result.

Consider the question which was used a few years ago in Ontario:

“Which electoral system should Ontario use to elect members to the provincial legislature?

“The existing electoral system.

“The alternative electoral system proposed by the Citizens’ Assembly (Mixed Member Proportional).”

How many Ontarians were really familiar with what the Citizen's Assembly had proposed? The best solution -- after having a fair hearing on the subject in the revamped parliamentary committee -- is to choose one system and give it a trial run. If it doesn't work, it can be abandoned or tweaked. If it does work, we should keep it.

Wednesday, June 15, 2016

In May of 2007, The Toronto Star ran a story about how Afghan soldiers -- who had been captured by Canadians -- were being abused in prison. Michael Byers and William Schabas write:

As one detainee told reporter Rosie DiManno,
“They whipped me with rubber hoses. Another time, they used a chain to
hang me from the ceiling, my head toward the floor.” The same detainee
said Canadian officials visited the prison operated by the Afghan
National Directorate of Security (NDS), but were never allowed to speak
with prisoners.

As the late James Travers
wrote, also in this newspaper, the story was part of a “long march into
twilight” for Canada. The country that “gave the world Lester Pearson’s
peacekeeping and Brian Mulroney’s stand against apartheid” now had to
struggle “with Stephen Harper’s apparent blindness to compelling
evidence of Afghanistan prisoner abuse.”

Three months later,
the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission estimated that “one
in three prisoners handed over by Canadians are beaten or even
tortured.” In March 2007, the U.S. State Department reported that:
“Complaints of serious human rights violations committed by
representatives of national security institutions, including arbitrary
arrest, unconfirmed reports of torture, and illegal detention were
numerous.”

Canadian
diplomat Richard Colvin was posted in Afghanistan during this period.
He wrote 17 separate reports that warned explicitly of torture and were
distributed widely within the Departments of Foreign Affairs and
National Defence. As Colvin explained when called to testify before a
Parliamentary committee, “for a year and a half after they (senior
Canadian officials) knew about the very high risk of torture, they
continued to order military police in the field to hand our detainees to
the NDS.”

The torture of prisoners of war is a war crime:

The Convention Against Torture stipulates that
“no exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a
threat of war, internal political instability or any other public
emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.” The Rome
Statute of the International Criminal Court specifies that even in “an
armed conflict not of an international character,” such as existed in
Afghanistan from 2002 onwards, the “cruel treatment and torture” of
detainees constitutes a war crime.

The
prohibition extends to anyone who knowingly facilitates torture,
including by “providing the means for its commission.” For this reason,
any soldier who transferred a detainee to a known risk of torture could
be guilty of a war crime. Any superior who ordered the transfer of a
detainee to a known risk of torture could also be guilty of a war crime.
This responsibility extends all the way up the chain of command,
including government ministers.

Nevertheless, the Harper government did its level best to sweep all the evidence under the rug -- where it remains to this day. Justin Trudeau seems bent on cleaning out the putrid stable that Stephen Harper left behind. But, so far, he has refused to touch the Afghan detainee issue.

Tuesday, June 14, 2016

Canadians are supposed to have a reputation for being polite. But, Robin Sears writes, that stereotype doesn't apply to the Canadian press corps. They are pretty good at stoking class envy:

Rarely a month goes by without some lazy reporter, certain of a
front-page story, digging up the shocking total of hotel costs of some
well-travelled trade minister, or the abomination of the two bottles of
Ontario wine consumed at a “working dinner” with a visiting dignitary.
(the quotes conveying always the ‘some work, some dinner!’ sneer).

Lately, Sophie Gregoire-Trudeau has been the target of their barbs:

One wonders if the mostly male editorial
writers at Canada’s two national newspapers could plausibly claim to be
such staunch guardians of the public purse, if they were attacking a
First Man and his choice of tailor.

The same gang tried it on Mila Mulroney and Laureen Harper, from time to time. But now they have doubled down.

It's time, Sears writes, to give Sophie her due:

Sophie Grégoire Trudeau happens to be an accomplished, popular and
valuable champion of Canada and of several charities, and reportedly, a
devoted mother. Are we really going to whinge about the domestic support
we provide her in those roles, or the costs of the Canadian designed
gowns she wears, or what the cost of the orange juice she consumes might
be? It is demeaning, but not of her or her husband.

Come on, let’s drop this veiled sexism and embarrassing class-envy.
Let’s be proud of a committed young family, raising their children in
the public eye, while attempting to lead the country, and to be
exemplars of Canadian values to the world.

Monday, June 13, 2016

The real battle in the United States won't be between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Chris Hedges writes that the real battle is between corporate power and ordinary citizens. And, if ordinary citizens are to win the battle, they must understand their opposition:

The reach and effectiveness of corporate propaganda dwarfs even the
huge effort undertaken by Adolf Hitler and Stalin. The layers of
deception are sophisticated and effective. News is state propaganda.
Elaborate spectacles and forms of entertainment, all of which ignore
reality or pretend the fiction of liberty and progress is real, distract
the masses.

Education is indoctrination. Ersatz intellectuals, along with
technocrats and specialists, who are obedient to neoliberal and imperial
state doctrine, use their academic credentials and erudition to deceive
the public.

The promises made by the corporate state and its political leaders—we
will restore your jobs, we will protect your privacy and civil
liberties, we will rebuild the nation’s infrastructure, we will save the
environment, we will prevent you from being exploited by banks and
predatory corporations, we will make you safe, we will provide a future
for your children—are the opposite of reality.

The Citizens United decision has allowed the corporate elite to establish a huge propaganda machine:

The corporate state, operating a system Sheldon Wolin
referred to as “inverted totalitarianism,” invests tremendous sums—$5
billion in this presidential election alone—to ensure that we do not see
its intentions or our ultimate predicament.

These systems of propaganda play on our emotions and desires. They
make us confuse how we are made to feel with knowledge. They get us to
identify with the manufactured personality of a political candidate.
Millions wept at the death of Josef Stalin, including many who had been
imprisoned in his gulags. There is a powerful yearning to believe in the
paternal nature of despotic power.

But, if the Trump and Sanders campaigns prove anything, it's that ordinary citizens are beginning to wake up to the fact that they've been played for chumps. There is some hope. But time is short:

We still have options. Many who work within ruling class structures
understand the corruption and dishonesty of corporate power. We must
appeal to their conscience. We must disseminate the truth.

Climate change, even if we halt all carbon emissions today, will still
bring rising temperatures, havoc, instability and systems collapse to
much of the planet.

Sunday, June 12, 2016

In Israel, the voices arrayed against the Netanyahu government are becoming louder. Murray Dobbins writes:

In the space of two days, new critics emerged from within the highest
positions of Israel state power. Moshe Ya'alon -- until recently the
Israeli Defence Minister -- and Major General Yair Golan, the Israeli
army's deputy chief of staff, confirmed what many of Israel's most
vociferous (and vilified) critics have been saying for years: that
Israel is heading down the road of extremism and racism.

Golan issued a warning
that linked attitudes and actions in pre-war Germany with trends in
Israel today. ''It's scary to see horrifying developments that took
place in Europe begin to unfold here,'' he said.

And political commentator Michael Brizon has entered the fray:

Israeli political commentator Michael Brizon, who writes under the
pseudonym B. Michael, concluded the failure of Western governments to
criticize what is happening in Israel is itself a new form of
anti-Semitism. Writing in a Haaretzop-ed
titled ''Yet Again the Jewish People Face Great Danger and the World Is
Silent,'' Brizon lamented the fact that the greatest danger to Israel
is now from within, not from its traditional enemies. ''With our very
own hands, we anointed the Huns who rule over us."

The irony for Michael is palpable: Israel's promise has been lost, he
wrote, and ''all that remains is a big mouth, brandished fist, and
endless hidden hatred, militarism, paganism, and self-righteousness. And
the world is silent.''

That silence is what terrifies Michael: ''...if you persist in your
silence, you indifferent world, that will be categorical proof that you
really are anti-Semitic, exactly as we've always been told.''

Andrew Cuomo, the governor of New York, is not bothered by Netanyahu's policies:

As if to prove the point, just days after this piece was published, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo signed an executive order
intended to punish companies and groups that join the BDS campaign --
the Boycott, Divest, Sanction campaign to peacefully pressure Israel to
comply with international law and recognize Palestinian rights.

''If you boycott Israel, New York will
boycott you,'' Cuomo said. Officials have been directed to compile a
list of companies and groups that have signed on to the BDS campaign.

The Trudeau government is also opposed to the BDS movement.

The Holocaust happened because those who could have stopped it remained silent.

Saturday, June 11, 2016

The Isle of Man tax avoidance scheme is nothing new. Linda McQuaig reminds her readers that Brian Mulroney cut the same kind of deal with the CRA:

The riveting image of the former prime
minister accepting wads of cash from a notorious lobbyist — admitted by
Mulroney under cross-examination at a 2009 public inquiry — was so
eye-popping that it completely eclipsed another fascinating aspect of
the story: the sweetheart tax deal Mulroney got from the Canada Revenue
Agency after he failed to report the cash.

Although
Mulroney had hidden the cash payments (totalling $225,000) from tax
authorities for six years, his lawyers managed to cut a deal that
allowed the former PM to avoid any fines or penalties, and only required
him to pay half the taxes he would have paid if he’d obeyed the tax
laws — laws that chumps like you and me are legally obliged to obey.

And the treatment of Mulroney wasn't exceptional -- for the wealthy:

The KPMG scam is undoubtedly just the tip of a
gigantic tax-avoidance iceberg. Canadians for Tax Fairness, a
labour-sponsored group, calculates Canada loses more than $7 billion a year in revenue due to wealthy individuals and corporations using tax havens.

Under
the Harper government, this sort of tax avoidance by the rich tended to
be viewed as a benign activity, a victimless crime, part of the notion
that taxes are inherently bad. But, of course, that’s only true if
you’re willing to go without schools, hospitals, roads, bridges,
pensions and other public goods that require tax revenue.

The
flourishing, highly lucrative tax avoidance business can also be blamed
for the complexity of the tax system, so frequently bemoaned by
right-wingers.

The folks Leona Helmsley called "the little people" have their taxes withdrawn with every pay cheque. It's their paper trail and they can't hide it. The wealthy have become very good at hide and seek. It's time the Trudeau government declared that different rules for different folks is no longer government policy. And the new policy has to have teeth.

Friday, June 10, 2016

On Sunday, when NDP MP Nikki Ashton tweeted that she was heading south to stump for Bernie Sanders, Conservative commentators were up in arms. Michael Harris writes:

But what (Conservative supporters wanted to know) was a Canadian MP
doing knocking on doors with campaign workers stumping for a U.S.
presidential candidate? Ashton told CBC that Sanders embodied the NDP’s
own leftist politics. “I believe we can learn from the kind of work that
they’re doing, the bold ideas they’re putting forward, the ways in
which they’re engaging and inspiring people.”

Still, those on the blue end of the political spectrum fumed. The
House of Commons was sitting and there was very important legislation
hanging by a thread in the Senate, from the assisted dying bill to the
RCMP union debate. So what was Ashton doing in Fargo?

For the most part, Ashton parried the blows skillfully. She explained
that she paid for her own trip and that the House does not sit on
Sundays — the day she was in Fargo. She was back in Ottawa on Monday in
time for question period. She told the National Post that she found many similarities between North Dakota and her riding in Manitoba. Her father Steve Ashton
went with her. (The former NDP MLA has time on his hands since losing
the seat he has held since 1981 in the recent Manitoba provincial
election that saw the Progressive Conservatives win a majority.)

There was no mention, of course, of Stephen Harper's recent visit to Las Vegas, where Republican money man Sheldon Adelson convened a conference on healing a divided political party:

Just how political was the event Harper attended in Las Vegas? You be
the judge. Harper’s old advisor, American political guru Arthur
Finkelstein — the guy who taught the National Citizens Coalition the art
of the political attack ad — was in attendance. Trump himself was
invited to speak at the RJC gathering where Harper spoke, although the
GOP’s answer to Elmer Gantry declined to attend. Adelson has pledged
$100 million to get Trump and other Republicans elected, and Trump in
turn has renounced his earlier position of neutrality in the
Israeli/Palestinian standoff. He now not only supports Israel’s illegal
settlements, he favors their expansion.

Harper himself tweeted that he was in Las Vegas to support Israel — a
handy way of denying he was there providing the campaigning Republican
Party with political advice during a presidential election year. He
wrote on April 10, 2016: “Thanks all for a great weekend in support of
Israel.” Influential American Rabbi Shmuel “Shmuley” Boteach tweeted
photos of Harper at the event, with the caption, “The Jewish community
and @RJC honoring the great prime minister of Canada Stephen Harper – a
great friend of Israel.”

There are three different stories to account for the former PM’s
second trip to Las Vegas: Harper was advising a Republican fundraising
group on how to unite their divided party, or he was there “exclusively “
to support Israel, or (if you don’t like either of those narratives)
the RJC was honoring the former prime minister. Which was true? Perhaps
all three. While in office, Harper behaved exactly like a northern
Republican.

Harper didn't have to be paid a lot for his services. Besides his salary as an MP, he will do very well when he retires:

Harper collects his MP salary of $167,400 even though he has not
participated in debate in the House of Commons since he lost power, and
only shows up in Parliament to vote. Besides catching the odd matinee,
or browsing in the business book section at Chapters, he has found time
to join the Ranchmen’s Club of Calgary and the Calgary Petroleum Club,
where he will rub shoulders with his favorite people — oil executives.

Harper has earned over four million dollars from taxpayers so far,
has had free transportation and has stayed in some pretty nice public
housing. If he lives to an average age, he will receive almost $10 million from taxpayers, according to the Huffington Post.

Apparently, political defeat has done nothing to dampen Conservative hypocrisy.

Thursday, June 09, 2016

Tom Friedman believes that the Republican Party is morally bankrupt. He wrote this week in the New York Times, that it should be blown up and reconstructed from scratch:

Today’s G.O.P. is to governing what Trump University is to education —
an ethically challenged enterprise that enriches and perpetuates itself
by shedding all pretense of standing for real principles, or a truly
relevant value proposition, and instead plays on the ignorance and fears
of the public.

It
is just an empty shell, selling pieces of itself to the highest
bidders, — policy by policy — a little to the Tea Party over here, a
little to Big Oil over there, a little to the gun lobby, to antitax
zealots, to climate-change deniers. And before you know it, the party
stands for an incoherent mess of ideas unrelated to any theory of where
the world is going or how America actually becomes great again in the
21st century.

It
becomes instead a coalition of men and women who sell pieces of their
brand to whoever can most energize their base in order for them to get
re-elected in order for them to sell more pieces of their brand in order
to get re-elected.

The United States needs two parties to function democratically:

America needs a healthy two-party system. America needs a healthy
center-right party to ensure that the Democrats remain a healthy
center-left party. America needs a center-right party ready to offer
market-based solutions to issues like climate change. America needs a
center-right party that will support common-sense gun laws. America
needs a center-right party that will support common-sense fiscal policy.
America needs a center-right party to support both free trade and aid
to workers impacted by it. America needs a center-right party that
appreciates how much more complicated foreign policy is today, when you
have to manage weak and collapsing nations, not just muscle strong ones.

But cowardice is the hallmark of today's GOP. None of the party's leaders will take on Donald Trump:

All
top G.O.P. leaders say they will still support Donald Trump — even if
he’s dabbled in a “textbook definition” of racism, as House Speaker Paul
Ryan described it — because he will sign off on their agenda and can do
only limited damage given our checks and balances.

Really?
Mr. Speaker, your agenda is a mess, Trump will pay even less attention
to you if he is president and, as Senator Lindsey Graham rightly put it,
there has to be a time “when the love of country will trump hatred of
Hillary.”

Like an old dog who's hips haven't given out, the Grand Old Party should be put out of its misery. What succeeds it is up to those who have the courage to reject Mr. Trump as the party's presidential candidate.

Wednesday, June 08, 2016

Yesterday, Lawrence Martin provided an historical review of the relationship between prime ministers and the press. And, while Justin Trudeau's appearance at last week's Parliamentary Press Gallery dinner was hailed as a tour de force, Martin writes that we shouldn't expect the camaraderie to last:

In one campaign, John Turner got filmed
giving a couple of women friendly pats on the posterior. It became a
national sensation. The media labelled his campaign plane Derri-Air.
Brian Mulroney tried getting along with the media but got in trouble
over such weighty affairs of state as the platoon of Gucci loafers
adorning his allegedly two-acre wardrobe chamber.

On
his anti-social calendar, Mackenzie King described the press gallery
dinner as his most unpleasant outing of the year. Jean Chrétien’s folksy
charm worked for a while with the press but he fumed at Shawinigate
coverage. Pierre Trudeau soured on gallery dinners after one in which a
bevy of half-smashed scribes pelted his table with buns.

Inevitably,
prime ministers determine, though often it is their own folly that is
the cause, that the media are biased against them. Justin Trudeau may be
even more apt to feel set upon than his father. In Pierre Trudeau’s
era, the press was more liberal. Today, the fellow who runs the great
mass of print media in the country is an avowed conservative,
Postmedia’s Paul Godfrey. Though not the force it used to be, print
still factors heavily in the national discussion and never have
conservatives been in control of more major newspapers.

Our democracy would be in trouble if camaraderie between our leaders and the press were the order of the day. However, it is refreshing when -- for one night of the year -- politicians and ink stained wretches can have the courage to laugh at themselves.

Tuesday, June 07, 2016

Over the weekend, the Swiss held a referendum in which they rejected a proposal for a guaranteed annual income. Andrew Coyne writes:

The model on which the Swiss voted was at the outer limits of what
anyone has imagined a basic income could or should entail. At 2,500
Swiss francs a month (about $40,000 a year) for every man, woman and
child in the country, the gross cost of such a program in Canada would
come to about $1.4 trillion, or more than two-thirds of our gross
domestic product. Even netting out the money not spent on the programs
it replaced, the Swiss plan was reckoned to cost a quarter of GDP in
additional taxes. No wonder voters rejected it.

But that doesn't mean a guaranteed annual income is a bad idea. And, interestingly, Coyne rejects the traditional conservative argument that a GAI would increase the likelihood of "moral hazard" by encouraging people to do nothing:

One of the oddest objections to the basic income idea, in this light, is
that it might reduce work incentives. Whatever minimal inducement to
idleness there may be in, say, a $10,000 annual income guarantee, it is
trivial compared to the benefits of cutting implicit tax rates to 20 or
25 per cent. Neither is a basic income needed as a substitute for wage
labour, as some advocates contend: robots are no more likely to make
humans obsolete in the 21st century than threshing machines did in the
18th.

Coyne does make the traditional conservative argument that a guaranteed annual income would streamline the cornucopia of government programs:

OK, so maybe a one-size-fits-all basic income guarantee is out of
reach, at least at one go. It’s still possible to move in that
direction, one piece at a time. Indeed, we already have what amount to
basic income guarantees for children in the new Canada Child Benefit
(combining the old Universal Child Care Benefit, the Canada Child Tax
Benefit and the National Child Benefit Supplement) and the elderly, via
Old Age Security and the Guaranteed Income Supplement. The federal
Working Income Tax Benefit is a basic income for the working-age
population, in embryonic form.

Could the WITB be merged with
OAS/GIS, the basic personal exemption, other federal and provincial tax
credits, and provincial social assistance programs to create a universal
adult income guarantee? In principle, certainly. Would it be worth some
additional cost? Again, yes: ensuring no one goes without, while
restoring work incentives and granting greater choice in public
services, would seem one of the best uses of public funds imaginable.

It's intriguing to see conservatives like Coyne and Hugh Segal argue for a guaranteed annual income. World of Wonders!

Monday, June 06, 2016

Bill C-14 has gone to the Senate. Who knows what will happen to it there? A clue can be found in independent senator Frances Lankin's email to several of her colleagues:

“For your information, I intend to submit amendments to; 1)
establish another review process focusing on Informed Consent and the
social conditions and social determinants of health issues that can
limit peoples’ real options and lead them to considering MAID because
other alternatives of support are not available…and 2) to establish an
end date for the reviews of eighteen months from the date of
commencement…I will continue to discuss Senators Cowan and Carignan’s
amendments with them (and engage Andre and Murray) and will let you all
know how that is proceeding. Frances”

Michael Harris writes that the Trudeau government is passing legislation to independent senators to stick handle through the Senate:

The same strategy is being followed with Bill C-7, the RCMP union
bill, which would give the Mounties the right to collective bargaining.
That bill is being carried in the Senate by former Liberal, and now
independent senator, Larry Campbell. Another new independent appointee,
Sen. Andre Pratte, is likewise steering the government’s Air Canada bill
through the Red Chamber. As one senator put it to me, “In all cases,
the newbies are being given a chance to shine.”

The independent senators know they are the wave of the future. But
they also realize they are being discriminated against by the
traditional factions still in control of the Senate. In a June 1, 2016
letter to Sen. Donald Plett, Chair of the Selection Committee, Sen.
Elaine McCoy, demanded fair representation on Senate committees for
Independent senators.

That's where the battle has been joined -- between the newbies and senators who are used to operating in the time honoured fashion. It will be interesting to see how that battle ends.

Sunday, June 05, 2016

When the Trudeau government agreed last week to adopt an NDP motion which populates the election reform committee on the basis of the votes each party received in the last election, it set up a working model of proportional representation. Andrew Coyne writes:

Strictly speaking, it does not matter whether a majority of the
members of the special parliamentary committee on electoral reform are
Liberals, or whether a majority are drawn from the opposition parties.
The committee may be tasked with consulting the public, studying
different models of reform, and advising the government how to proceed,
but nothing says the government has to accept its recommendations.

On
the other hand, symbolism matters in politics. Whatever influence the
committee has will rely less on its formal authority than its moral
authority, depending on how genuinely it is seen to have consulted, how
warmly its recommendations are received — and how legitimate the
committee itself is perceived as being.

The committee will give Canadians an accurate notion of how proportional representation works. And, if it works well, the going should get easier:

The whole issue of electoral reform is rooted in the divergence, common
under the first past the post system, between the parties’
representation in the House and their share of the popular vote. If the
Liberals’ rhetoric about the current system “distorting the will of the
electorate” exposed them to ridicule for having set up the committee
along those same distorted lines, the committee as now designed is a
working model of proportional representation, “a lab rat,” as
Conservative commentator David McLaughlin has put it, “for how PR might
work in the House of Commons.”

It's impossible to predict how things will work out. However,

already the possibilities are intriguing. A majority on the committee
could be formed by any combination of the Liberals and the Conservatives
(with three votes) or the NDP (with two) — or both the Bloc Québécois
and the Greens, each of whom has one vote. Assume for the moment that
the popular assumptions about each party’s position are true: the NDP
and the Greens favouring PR, the Conservatives and the Bloc the status
quo, while the Liberals plump for ranked ballots. Do the Liberals work
out a deal with the NDP, some sort of hybrid of PR and ranked ballots?
Do the Conservatives cut their own deal, perhaps with the Liberals,
perhaps with the NDP, offering to vote for either’s preferred reform in
return for the referendum the Tories hope will kill it?

Whatever happens, it's always easier to sell something -- and generate return business -- when people know what they're buying.

Saturday, June 04, 2016

Our last two prime ministers surfed to power on populist waves. But neither man was a populist. Susan Delacourt writes:

With
the arrival of Justin Trudeau and his new government this past year,
Canadians seem to be caught in some ambivalence about populism.

Trudeau
may be popular, but he’s not populist. No Canadian would confuse him
with Mr. Everyman, even if he held some ordinary jobs in his past:
teacher, bouncer, snowboard instructor. He grew up at 24 Sussex Dr.,
rubbing shoulders with the likes of the Queen and Ronald Reagan, and
since becoming prime minister, he’s been cultivating a reputation as an
international celebrity.

It’s actually
been striking to see how Trudeau has been so deliberately non-populist.
Even before he moved into the job his father used to hold, Trudeau
didn’t seem to be fussed about reminding Canadians that he enjoyed a
higher-than-average income and lifestyle.

And, while Stephen Harper was good at stoking populist anger, he was himself an elitist:

Harper did the whole hockey-dad,
guy-from-the-suburbs routine while he was prime minister, but the fact
is that he wasn’t like most Canadians, before or during his time running
the country. He spent most of his career in politics, he was above
average in intelligence and he didn’t have a lot of time for friendship.

Harper wouldn’t be the first name to come
to mind in those poll questions about which politician you’d like to
meet over beer or coffee. (Harper drank neither.) “I can’t even get my
friends to like me,” Harper joked in his eulogy for the late finance minister Jim Flaherty.

Nonetheless,
Harper played the populism card successfully through several elections,
casting his Liberal rivals as Starbucks-swilling elites. Nowhere was
this more evident than in the contest with then leader Michael
Ignatieff, whose international reputation and Harvard experience were
transformed into a political liability.

In the United States, a man who is certainly no populist plans to ride a wave of populist anger all the way to the White House:

Donald Trump is a billionaire, a very
un-average American, riding a wave of populist anger, some of it
directed at privileges for the wealthy in the United States. Income
inequality is a growing problem in the U.S., but it seems that the
contest this fall is likely to be a choice between two of the richest
people in the country: Trump and Hillary Clinton. It
all tells us that populism is an extremely unpredictable force in
politics, operating against logic or even its own rules. Populism can be
forgiving of political errors, or brutally unforgiving, too.

The man or woman who rides a populist wave rides on the back of a tiger. He or she can quickly discover that they have moved from the tiger's back to the tiger's belly. It happened to Stephen Harper. It could happen to Justin Trudeau. And who knows what will happen to Donald Trump?

Friday, June 03, 2016

Tom Walkom has a must read column in today's Toronto Star. The contentious debate over Bill C-14, he writes, is about much more than the right to die. It's also about the right to live:

If government has any role in this life and death matter it is not to
ensure that as many as possible exercise their right to die. Rather it
is to create conditions that would allow as many as possible to keep on
living.

The right to death is not the same as other rights. Unlike, say, the right to free speech, it is irrevocable.

Those exercising free speech rights can
reverse themselves later. Those exercising death rights cannot. Death is
a one-way ticket.

Canadian society
recognizes this when it comes to suicide. Suicide is seen as a tragedy.
We devote medical resources to psychiatrists and others in the hope that
they can talk people out of suicide. We involuntarily commit to
hospital those deemed at risk of harming themselves.

In
Toronto, special fences exist along the Bloor-Danforth viaduct to deter
would-be suicides from hurling themselves into the Don Valley.

In short, while suicide is legal in Canada, society does everything it
can to convince those weary of life from taking this extreme measure.

Moreover, he points out, the debate occurs as Canada wrestles with how to deal with an aging population:

In Belgium, according to government
statistics, 75 per cent of those who take advantage of voluntary
euthanasia are between the ages of 60 and 89.

It
is no coincidence that Canada’s debate over voluntary euthanasia comes
as this country struggles over how to pay for the costs associated with
an aging population. We may decry death, but it is the cheapest
solution.

Palliative care is not cheap. But I watched my mother die in palliative care a little over a year ago; and I was impressed with how she was treated in her final days. Jim Morrison wrote -- quite rightly -- that nobody gets out of here alive. That fact is undeniable. The debate is really about how we take our leave.

About Me

A retired English teacher, I now write about public policy and, occasionally, personal experience. I leave it to the reader to determine if I practice what I preached to my students for thirty-two years.